Now, on to the fight: America is explicitly NOT a democracy.

Yes, it is. You even say so yourself:

America is a democratic Republic.

"Democracy" in modern parlance == "democratic republic". When the word "democracy" is used in regular conversation, NO ONE is talking about Athenian-style direct democracy, unless they explicitly say so. It's only pedants like you who even think of this.

It was formed that way EXPLICITLY to prevent mob rule.

Democratic republics exist for several reasons. One is because no one citizen can possibly be competent at voting on every single issue that faces a large and populous nation, nor can every citizen be expected to invest that much time into the governing process. So we "outsource" most of the work of governing to politicians called "representatives", and elect them to represent us and do our bidding. The rules you talk about do exist to make sure there's a longer feedback loop, so people's short-term reactionary tendencies don't make a mess of things, and so that there's a rule of law: people have to follow laws, until the laws are changed.

The Constitution and Bill of rights spell out what America is supposed to be. If there is a true need for the Republic to change the rules it is built upon, then there are mechanisms in place to do that... but THEY HAVE NOT BEEN USED.

Yes, they have. The Constitution has been amended dozens of times since it was written, and countless Supreme Court cases have further changed laws. And if you have some kind of problem with a court effectively legislating and deciding law, then you have a problem with English Common Law, which this country was explicitly founded upon.

Why? We can argue about that forever. Regardless, the basic rules from which all other rules rest upon, have not been changed. That means a police state is incompatible with American law; both in the letter and spirit of the law.

Completely incorrect. If case law and legislation (at all levels of government) have resulted in a police state, then a police state is indeed compatible with American law, by very definition.

It's sad how poorly educated in basic Civics most Americans are these days.

Don't be stupid. Anyone who's an American Citizen is by definition an American, whether you like it or not, and whether you agree with them (and their idiotic ideas) or not. They certainly are "welcome" in America, they're Citizens and they were born here. Whether something is against the "spirit" of the founding laws is open to debate, and quite frankly, totally irrelevant since, as a representative democracy, this country (and any other with the same form of government) is supposed to reflect the will of the citizenry. If the citizens are a bunch of fools who vote for police-state laws, then that's what they're supposed to have. You're obviously the one here who opposes democracy and wishes to have an authoritarian government, because any government which does not reflect the will of the voters can only be authoritarian.

The several times I used Uber, it was great too. They picked me up in luxury cars (Mercedes, BMWs) and had much nicer cars than the towncar services I tried. They used GPS and took me by the most direct route, while the towncar service took weird back roads that took a lot longer. The towncars were also older and in poor shape, whereas the Uber cars were rather new and clean.

"A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once." – W. Shakespeare

Exactly. A decent bicycle is faster (Segways top out at 12mph), much cheaper, not hard to fix, and if I need to go up some stairs or over other terrain, it's not hard to just pick it up and carry it. How much do Segways weigh?

Can't you ever see anything positive about the Obama administration? You're just dead-set on opposing them, no matter what they do. Your racism is showing. Go home and sleep it off, and do a better job of disguising it next time, because everyone in the world just saw through you. +5 Insightful my ass, more like +5 Racist.

You're not too bright, are you? Congress has ultimate authority over NASA, and over everything in the entire government. They control funding for everything, and write laws to that effect.

If your boss at your company tells you to do something wasteful and unethical, then you either do it or find a new job.

It is terribly inconsistent, true, however it's also extremely adaptable, which is why it has a much larger vocabulary than any other language. Basically, English is the Borg of languages.

Spanish is crappy because it has a ridiculously low information density compared to just about every other language. It's horribly verbose and has too many syllables to say the simplest things.

Mexico and other Latin American countries are not exactly highly industrialized. If you want to get something made, you either go to Germany or Japan (if it's really high-dollar and needs extreme precision) or you go to China (if it's cheaper and you need huge volumes). Latin America is where you go if you just need some agricultural produce.

So basically, if you want to talk to educated people who actually make things work in the world, don't waste your time learning Spanish.

My understanding is that Portuguese is much closer to Latin than Spanish (Castilian) is. (Also, Galician is very close to Portuguese.) Basically, Spanish is a crappy derivative of Latin.

No but if you got a government request for your keys you'd know about it.

The government "request" would come in form of customised malware and you'd never even know you got hacked.

If google gets such a request you wouldn't know you were compromised.

You aren't gonna know, no matter what.

It isn't like they are sending l33t hackers to break in and get the data.

Schmidt isn't an idiot, despite how the press like to portray him via selective quoting (note that TFA does not provide much context for this quote). When he says Google is the safest place to put your data, he's probably comparing Google to other companies that provide similar services, not some hypothetical fully self hosted system - bearing in mind self hosting of email is rapidly going the way of the dodo even in business situations (it died for home email a long time ago).

Given that Yahoo still have not fully deployed SSL everywhere let alone encrypted their internal datacenter links, and if Microsoft have a similar effort they aren't talking about it, there's some evidence that he might be right. After all, if you get a government warrant for your data you're just as stuck as Google is: not much you can do about it. On the other hand, you are unlikely to secure your infrastructure as well as Google does.

But Google makes money from targeted advertising

Google makes significant sums of dough from paying corporate customers who use Google Apps. These clients can switch off advertising if they like. These are also the places where some of the most sensitive data is stored.

So Google have both the financial means and incentive to solve the end to end crypto problem for such clients. The difficulty is not financial. It's technological. Matching even just the feature set of Gmail with end to end crypto is insanely hard, and that's before you hit the "everything is a web app" problem.

The point of forward secrecy is there are no such keys to seize. The "master keys" are only used for identification, not encryption. So whilst a gov could theoretically seize Google's keys, this does not help them decrypt wire traffic. They'd have to do a large MITM attack, and to get everything? They'd have to decrypt and forward ALL Google's traffic. Not feasible.

Good use of applied cryptography means that realistically the only way for a government to get data out of it means requesting it specifically from the providers. In places where the warrant system has been vapourised (which certainly includes the USA and UK), this might not seem like much, but it does help prevent fishing expeditions.